The BEST Way to Organize Your Recipes!

One of my biggest passions in life is cooking. It relaxes me, inspires me, and just down right tastes good! I have quite a collection of favorite family recipes, and I'm always trying new recipes from magazines and Pinterest.

Want to know how I organize all my recipes?

I have experimented with many different ways over the years, and this is my tried-and-true, no-fail method I have been using for awhile now.

I use two binders: 

One for meal recipes,

and one for desserts.

I use 4" x 6" photo pages to hold all the recipe cards in my binders. You can find similar ones HERE on Avery's website. Each page holds 6 recipes, and the pages come in packs of 10. So for about $4 or $5, you can store 60 recipes. 

I like using the photo pages because the recipes are easy to see and flip through, and they're protected from my messy cooking : )

I use stick-on tabs to organize my Meal Binder into these categories: 

Main Dishes

Sides

Salads

Soups

Breakfast 

Breads

Beverages

Appetizers

Sauces/Condiments/Marinades

And my Desserts Binder into these categories:

Cakes

Cookies

Breads

Brownies

Bars/Squares

Pies/Cobblers

Candy

Trifles

Miscellaneous Sweets

I sub-categorize my "Main Dishes" section to make meal recipes easier to find:

Chicken

Beef

Pork

Seafood

Other

You can find Avery's NoteTabs HERE.

Now how do I organize recipes I'd like to try?

I clip lots of recipes from magazines (Martha Stewart Living's Everyday Food and Taste of Home are some of my favorites!) and print many from the computer I would like to try. I want to keep those "to try" recipes neatly organized and easily accessible so I'll remember to give them a try, but I want them separate from my favorite recipes so I don't have to spend forever searching for Grandma's Chocolate Chip Cookies. 

My solution is simple page protectors. I place a top-loading page protector behind each recipe category to catch all my "to try" pages and label it with another stick-on tab. 

This way, if I flip through my binder and don't find any recipes that strike my fancy, I can pull out my "to try" recipes and cook up something new!

Once I try a recipe and decide it's a keeper, I place the recipe in the back pocket of the binder to be typed up on a recipe card when I have a chance. I usually try to do this every month or so. I don't want to waste my time typing up a recipe if I don't even know I'll like it yet!

When I make my menu for the week, I pull the recipes I'll be using and store them in the front pocket of my binder so I can quickly find them on busy week nights. 

And I store extra photo pages and page protectors in the back of my binder so they're ready to go when I need them!

And that's how I keep it all organized! I hope I've given you a few ideas on how to better organize your own recipes! This method keeps me from getting in that "I have no idea what to cook for dinner" slump and has made cooking so much easier. And what an awesome heirloom to pass down to my children and grandchildren!

How do you organize your favorite recipes?